March 6, 2002 -- RCN Corporation (Nasdaq: RCNC) has announced the completion of a corporate-wide initiative to consolidate its Network Operation Centers (NOCs). The new centralized NOC, located at the company's Trooper, Pennsylvania regional headquarters, replaces multiple NOCs with an integrated, comprehensive Network Management System (NMS) that should be able to respond to customer service issues and network outages with greater efficiency and more cost-effectively.

The consolidation project, which began in August 2000, folded seven separate operation centers into the single Trooper facility. RCN had acquired the separate NOCs through its acquisition of various independent Internet service providers (ISPs). The centralized NOC supports over 1.2 million customer connections and more than one billion voice and ISP minutes per month. RCN's centralized NMS is expected to result in significant customer service enhancements and enable the company to isolate, fix and restore service disruptions on an expedited basis.

RCN's centralized NOC is also equipped with full backup capabilities, including backup power supplies and dual entrances for network connectivity, which "harden" it against the disruption of service. In addition, the network management tools used at the Trooper facility work off of distributed databases. Thus, monitoring of the network could be assumed by any one of a number of additional servers connected to the system, in the unlikely event of a more severe service disruption at the centralized NOC.

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